Johnnie To
(#1–10 of 11)

Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To has long been adding balletic touches to both his gunslinging action movies and his wild romantic comedies, which made the prospect of his first outright musical—in 3D, no less—one of the most exciting selections in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. But even hardcore fans could scarcely anticipate what a major departure Office is for the director. To arranges the film around a gigantic, blacked-out set filled with the skeletal outlines of consumerist life: Subways constructed of nothing more than winding, orange pipes carry workers to a corporate office of endless computer desks encased in glass. On the building’s bottom floor, the work environment opens imperceptibly into a department store, further limiting the parameters of the film’s world and presenting a closed ecosystem of money that resembles Playtime by way of Dogville.

“I feel more ready than I ever have to do something incredibly different and challenging and scary. I think because I just played Sally Bowles [in the Broadway revival of Cabaret]. You know, because you started on Broadway, there’s something about having to go up and do it every night, no matter how you’re feeling, having to tell the whole arc of a story and not just scene by scene the way that you do on film. I feel more like I understand acting in a different way. It’s totally different when you’re shooting something. But only in the past six months to a year have I felt like I can really try these different things. I think I was really scared of that for a long time. And if something was really challenging, I thought that I was just going to fall on my face and embarrass myself. I’m just less scared of that now, of failing.”

Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini may not be the finest film playing at Toronto this year, but this wholly unconventional biopic manages to stick in the brain like few I’ve seen so far. Taking for its subject only the last day of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s life, the film should, by normal generic conventions, be nothing more than foreshadowing for Pasolini’s grisly murder. Instead, it’s almost defiantly banal, focused on the simple tasks of making art, such as reviewing rushes, typing and revising copy, and workshopping ideas with peers and loved ones. In terms of commitment and research and all the other method trappings that turn real lives into showboating for actors, Willem Dafoe brings little more than his slight resemblance to Pasolini, an extraordinarily freeing decision that, in classic Ferrara style, deliberately foregrounds the actor’s own identity along with the character’s, making plain the work of acting just as the film itself looks at the other elements of artistic production.

“It’s an actor’s job to prepare for a role in whatever way the script demands; it may have been difficult for Leto to wax his entire body, but it’s sort of a weird punchline for a person whose entire role was about body discomfort and the painful modifications one must make to feel okay with oneself. Leto got money and at least one award for playing his part in Dallas Buyers Club; it’s strange that he didn’t take into account the notion that his struggle was not, in fact, the most important one involved in his role.”

Prolific Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To performs a border crossing with Drug War, his first cops-and-criminals film shot and set in mainland China, and in some ways the filmmaker is stretching his legs with all that extra space at his disposal. We follow police captain Zhang Lei (Sun Honglei) as he teams up with repentant drug manufacturer Timmy Choi (Louis Koo) to dismantle Choi’s former syndicate and take down his associates, and the film feels perpetually in transit as they’re on the chase, moving from city to city, on the road and via train. Overall, the shift doesn’t mark a radical departure for To. There’s definitely a different relationship to space and the urban environment, a changing-up of textures and details, but it all feels like a familiar overarching trajectory.

For example, the fact that the film ends in a slaughterhouse of a shootout is hardly the stuff of spoilers, though much of the first half is rather bloodless, almost sedate, as Zhang and his team track down leads and put together pieces of the puzzle, procedural-style. It’s more about surveillance and analysis and interrogation than gun battles, and instead To sharply mines the tension of potential flashpoints of violence that never quite get there. In those situations Zhang feels like an archetypal supercop, with an unremittingly loyal and deferential team and the ability to cow anyone he speaks to through sheer force of will. He’s chasing adversaries that may be 10 steps ahead, but he’s got a long stride and a sixth sense.

Both Takashi Miike’s muscular chase flick Shield of Straw and Johnnie To’s wildly compounded romantic policier Blind Detective make an asset out of their respective pillaging of genre signifiers. That these individual films succeed to varying degrees—in some instances in spite of themselves—matters little in the grand scheme of their creators’ narratives: Each have made more original films, more consistently compelling films, and flat-out better films. But there’s something oddly compelling about their unique existences as notable entries in what now could be considered prestigious filmographies.

Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. Not simply a house of mirrors reflecting the soullessness of our Internet age, each sprawling urban surface in Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai’s effortless romantic comedy Don’t Go Breaking My Heart is a potential window to heartfelt emotional connection. This great Hong Kong directing duo, known primarily for directing balletic actioneers, tweaks the standard conventions of the genre to make the love triangle between a downtrodden architect (Daniel Wu), a mid-level worker bee (Yuanyuan Gao), and a womanizing C.E.O. (Louis Koo) feel altogether fresh. The most notable subversion comes during the traditional meet-cute sequences where two characters see each other for the first time from their office windows, flirting via vaudeville-like performances and mosaics painted with colorful Post-it Notes. It’s a lovely visual motif that favors space and distance as opposed to the classic verbal diarrhea most American romantic comedies use as a crutch. Throughout Don’t Go Breaking My Heart, relationships are created with physical movement yet emotions are transferred through modern-day technology. In this sense, To and Wai establish a seamless relationship between camera, perspective, and space, allowing the charms of each character to flourish from afar, in poetic buffoonery. Considering the film’s glassy mise-en-scène, layers of physical space often misdirect point of view, primarily because of angle, complicating emotional entanglements in a wonderfully postmodern way. I can’t think of a cinematic concrete jungle that is this moonstruck.